Early Humans

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT EARLY HUMANS - PAGE 5

With the release of "Backdraft" on video, another film is available on a subject that has fascinated and frightened people throughout history: fire. Despite the drama associated with fire, only a few such films have been produced over the years. While a few of the stories sizzle, a few fizzle. Fire films run the gamut, however, from how early humans learned to control it to how future societies may use it to destroy knowledge. Here are a few "fire" films that you can use to stoke your electronic hearth on a cold night.

That good feeling you get by writing a check to your favorite charity could be your brain patting itself on the back. Reporting in Friday's issue of the journal Science, a team of economists and psychologists at the University of Oregon have found that donating money to charity activates regions of the brain associated with pleasure. The study represents a major advance in the young field of neuroeconomics, a collaboration between economists and psychologists to determine how the brain directs the way people handle money.

Only in the last hundred years has making light, airy breads been a certainty. Before that, breadmaking took years of experience and a generous measure of luck. Early humans made bread by mixing crushed grains with water and spreading the mixture on stones to bake in the sun. Later, similar mixtures were baked in hot ashes. The ancient Egyptians are credited with making the first leavened bread. Perhaps a batch of dough was allowed to stand before it was baked. Wild yeast cells settled in and grew, producing tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide and making the dough rise.

Lifetime has given a pilot order to an adaptation of Jean M. Auel's prehistorical-set young adult books " The Clan of the Cave Bear ." The project is a co-production of Fox 21 and Lionsgate in association with Imagine Television and Allison Shearmur Productions. Exec producers are Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Allison Shearmur, Linda Woolverton, Francie Calfo and Auel. Woolverton, whose credits include children's and young adult-focused films "Maleficent," "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Lion King," will pen the pilot.

What is surely one of the most ambitious, audacious journalistic projects ever attempted will begin in January with a footstep headed out of Ethiopa's Rift Valley, just like one early humans took 50,000-70,000 years ago. And those footsteps will continue, 30 million of them, for an estimated 21,000 miles and seven years, in a retracing of the migratory route of humankind. That Paul Salopek is the journalist undertaking this bipedal exploration of our species' past and present is not a surprise.

Start with miso soup, a classically simple Japanese recipe. For an appetizer, try a small plate of pasta al pesto. On to the main course: grilled chinook salmon, with steamed Chinese cabbage on the side. End with a Greek salad, sprinkled with olive oil, and a New Zealand kiwi fruit for dessert. An eclectic menu, to be sure. But it could contain some of the world's healthiest dishes. Miso soup, according to recent Japanese research, may help prevent cancer, as may the cabbage. Salmon, olive oil and the garlic in your pesto can all help fight heart disease.

`It is distasteful, but it can't be stopped and it shouldn't be stopped. If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.' -- Bill Handel, a fertility expert, concerning an Internet auction in which beautiful models are offering their eggs for sale. ILLINOIS GOV. GEORGE RYAN, SPEAKING IN HAVANA ON MONDAY: `Basically, that's the problem with Cuba--Fidel Castro. . . . Forty years of heavy communist rule under Castro has left its mark.

In a city that prides itself on toughing out freezing winters and monstrous snowfalls, the unprecedented tropical conditions of the last few days left Chicagoans noticeably off-balance, almost like Eskimos plopped rudely in the middle of an Amazon rain forest. Indeed, the Chicago area has never resembled the tropics more than it did late last week, with temperatures topping 100 degrees and an unbelievable heat index of 119 Thursday and Friday at Midway Airport, brought on in part by a record-high dew point--the measure of how much water the air can hold.

As interior decorators, cave dwellers in Brazil's Amazonian rain forest 11,000 years ago were as spectacularly messy as they were creative. Both traits are part of an astonishing archeological portrait that a researcher with the Field Museum of Natural History says could transform theories of how the first humans arrived at and dispersed through the Americas and how humans have been upsetting rain forest ecology ever since. Ultimately the tale of how life took hold in the Brazilian rain forest may point to a whole new theory of where and how early humans first evolved in Africa.

Many health-conscious Americans are understandably confused. Medical researchers cannot seem to make up their minds about what people should do to preserve their health for as long as possible. After years of advice to reduce fat intake to 30 percent of daily calories and limit cholesterol consumption to less than 300 milligrams a day, the public learns that a British scientist has concluded after reviewing the best available studies that such a diet has a minimal-if any-effect on heart disease and coronary death rates.